Henry Hyndman and the Democratic Federation

Good article in regard to the awaking of humanity by one of the early socialist thinkers, writers & philosophers. These ideas gradually took form and in the 1920’s creating the beginnings of socialist movement of The Labour Party. Many of these ideas were put in to place by Clem Attlee, Anuerin Bevin when the Labour came into power at Westminster in 1946. They created the worlds first National Heath Service, built prefabs & houses to replace the bombed homes & factories. Continued feeding programs for the poor & homeless. As for myself as a child their greatest achievement was to take sweets of rationing & the introduction of bananas that was big. I didn’t however enjoy my first NHS operation for a mastoid. Then the men in my family started to be demobbed & come home and I couldn’t understand why they were not all happy. I know now though.

One of the first Socialist parties in the latter 19th century was Henry Hyndman’s Democratic Federation, founded in 1881. Hyndman corresponded with Marx about reviving Chartism, and intended his new Federation to be a working class organisation continuing ‘the great work of Spence and Owen, , Stephens and Oastler, O’Connor and O’Brien, Ernest Jones and George J. Harney’. Beer in his History of British Socialism considered that his ideas were derived from Marx, Bronterre O’Brien and Benjamin Disraeli. At its founding conference in June 8th, 1881, the party decided on the following programme:

1. Universal suffrage.

2. Triennial parliaments.

3. Equal electoral divisions.

4. Payment of members.

5. Corruption and bribery of the electors to be punishable as criminal offences.